Spent the weekend testing the limits of heat endurance and my sunscreen at the Vancouver Island Music Festival in Courtenay.

Steven Page was solo-ing after leaving Barenaked Ladies.

Arlo Guthrie played for us on his birthday and was repaid with cake and our wonderful singing.

Saturday was so hot the most popular venue was the Woodland Stage as it had the only shady seats. But Eric Bibb was hot enough to draw a crowd no matter the temperature.

Del McCoury and his almost all-family band were top notch Saturday nighters.

James Keelaghan

and Martyn Joseph

at one of the song circles.

The Comox Valley Farmers’ Market is excellent, enviable and right next door to the festival site: an extra treat for Saturday morning. The sour cherries looked good enough to take home,

but somehow the wrong thing to be hauling around all the hot, hot, hot day long.

Sunday morning kicked off – almost as hot as Saturday – with the likes of Jim Byrnes and The Sojourners

and the star of the show, IMHO, the wondrous Eric Bibb

Had we been tall enough, we would truly have hung from the rafters to enjoy this blistering blues workshop, featuring both Bibbs (Eric and his dad Leon), Michael Jerome Browne Band, Jim Byrnes, Luke Guthrie, Sam Hurrie…

Mark Stuart and Stacey Earle gave a farewell (as a duo) performance – both are heading into solo projects.

Yves Lambert et le Bebert Orchestra started the Sunday night set off with some fun.

Some lovely things at the festival: the water wagon was a definite treat, bringing chilled water to the masses in this festival that dared to ban plastic water bottles.

There was also a liquid godsend in the form of the jet tent, where you could get a cooling blast of mist…

And there were artists at work here and there.

The food was pretty good. The Nomad’s Kitchen was as folky as they come

serving platters like this one with grilled salmon

But Woodstock’s smokies were up to their usual magnificent standard; the top seller again was the Gardener’s Revenge (venison) – and very good it was too.

A fabulous treat which sadly sold out before Sunday elevenses: the outstanding caramel nut bar, lovingly crafted by Corfield Coffee Bar in Duncan.

I’ve split myself into two blogs – I wanted to see if I could prune some of my more garden-specific thoughts into my Random Garden blog – but then there’s farming which has to do with food and also growing things, so it’s going to be a little difficult to know what to post where for a while here.

I happened upon a story about Manitoba potato farmers that I wanted to share; it’s coverage of a new film that looks interesting:

Food sovereignty and the fate of the family farm are big issues for all of us who eat. I also recommend farmer Jonathan Wright’s ground-up account of what it’s like to try to farm sustainably in Alberta; part one, part two, and part three. And a visit to their farm here.

I read that Whole Foods is now planning to take on non-GMO labelling. Well, I guess had the recession not slowed its growth it might have reached the size of a small country so perhaps it makes sense that this should be where the initiative comes from, if governments won’t do it. Whatever else, it will certainly give the chain an enviable marketing edge in North America.

This last was a spectacularly warm weekend in Victoria, perfect for the fifth Organic Islands festival. On Saturday the Terralicious team talked us through a sneaky way to ply your family with vegetables.

Tina and Dayle concocted a couple of lovely pizza combinations, with fennel and potato as the main stars.

Then there was a talk on the topic of Reviving the Vancouver Island Diet. Food security by any other name, it featured a crew of familiar faces and voices. Local farmer and writer Tom Henry

spoke about the need for Canadians to pay a fair price for their food – to allow local farmers to produce it; to encourage politicians to help small local meat producers raise and humanely/ locally slaughter food animals; and he stressed the importance of staying on top of local politics where these might impinge on food security – citing a potential loophole in Metchosin’s secondary suite provisions that could allow the unscrupulous to subdivide farmland.

He appeared with Carolyn Herriot, talking about food security, the power of the land to provide a living, and her irritation with corruption in local politics; she has a long-standing mistrust of the nutritional value of foods reared hydroponically and so felt affirmed, if shocked, to read recently that greenhouses block the UV light needed to form antioxidants in vegetables.

Bill Code talked about the power of food to heal, and the community value of the Island Farmers Alliance; and Jen Fisher Bradley championed food collectives, debt forgiveness (student loan debts/young farmers) and the Vancouver Island Diet.

After too much sun, an organic hot dog and a dribbly cornetto di gelato, it was time to crowd beneath the tent to hear Jeremy Fisher play some old and some things from his new cd Goodbye Blue Monday.

There has been a fair amount of coverage of the plight of Canada’s literary magazines over the past few months, which risk an untimely end if the wrong-headed Canada Periodical Fund comes into being as proposed in February: their long-term fate still hangs in the balance. The conditions of the fund are that support will only be provided to journals with paid subscriptions of more than 5000, which rules out pretty much every literary journal in the country. The summer break is a good time to carry on reminding our legislators of the importance of these publications, and that they cannot survive if pitted against for-profit publications.

In these crazed times where market-happy management grads attempt to reduce every aspect of life to a business model, we need to wake up and admit that not everything – certainly not culture, not food production – can or should be run on a ruthlessly corporate model; and that you may cripple or ruin some of your most essential industries by imposing “efficiencies” and cost-cutting measures upon them.

Literary magazines are hugely important to Canada. They’re the first place we’ve seen so many of our literary greats in print; they carry a permanent legacy of our literature’s evolution – the paper and ink of print publication, blending more and more with an online presence; and they simply cannot survive in our under-populated country without the aid of grants, any more than can our literary publishers.

If you’re a Canadian, please take a moment to sign the online petition that The New Quarterly has set up; or print off the pdf version from Arc. You can also join the Facebook group: Coalition to Keep Federal Support of Literary, Scholarly and Arts Magazines.

This week’s excitement was helping out Terralicious, the gardening & cooking school at Haliburton farm. There was a hungry crew to feed lunch to, while they worked to restore the wetlands area that’s attached to the farm and which the university uses to study amphibians and other wetlands wildlife.

Tubs of farm-grown lettuce to wash.

Some sage butter for the squash pasta sauce:

Rather beautiful appetizers: cucumber slices topped with berry cream and tayberries

and anchovy butter and radish.

Much enjoyed.

Two kinds of pasta sauce; the squash and sage, and/or the arugula pesto with sautéed tomato halves.

And for dessert, some divine crumble, of rhubarb and berries and apples, before

and after, with a dollop of ginger cream.

Meanwhile, in the park, a couple of hummingbird babes are nearly ready to fly…

Blackberries (Himalayan) getting pollinated…

Blackberries (Trailing) getting ready to pick…

Canada Day was fine… many namesake geese on the Gorge, gorging in the sun.

Some garlic scapes on offer

and a bit of Morris dancing.

And here’s my little tribute to the day… Anton scored a couple of free treats from the dog biscuit lady.

I was trying to regain a bit of poetry in my life by looking through a birds & bees-ish poetry collection that’s been by my bed for a few weeks now. I belong to the Poetry Book Society which brings surprising books into my life every few months. This one was Weeds and Wild Flowers, by Alice Oswald, which is a beautiful-looking book as well as another skilled collection of poetry. See how she describes a snowdrop:

A pale and pining girl, head bowed, heart gnawed,
whose figure nods and shivers in a shawl
of fine white wool, has suddenly appeared
in the damp woods, as mild and mute as snowfall.
She may not last. She has no strength at all,
but stoops and shakes as if she’d stood all night
on one bare foot, confiding with the moonlight.
…

And as for bees, Seeds of Diversity Canada has a campaign going to try to find out just what pollinators we have out there. Pollination Canada has a downloadable kit to allow you to be a Pollinator Observer and take measure of the bees, beetles, birds and other critters out there helping plants to propagate. There’s another organization, the North American Pollinators Protection Campaign, which also aims to help endangered pollinators.

Back to the battles with crawlies: Haliburton has been fighting wireworms

for a while. Lately these little devils have developed a technique of attacking cucumber seedlings by crawling up the stem and sucking the life out of them, so they end up keeling over like this:

The organic solution is to use potato bait, for a wireworm loves nothing so much as a nice feed of spud. So the farmers have been cutting potatoes into pieces, skewering them with wooden skewers, and burying them near the seedlings they’re trying to protect. Every so often you just pull them up by the skewer and pick out any perpetrators for a swift dispatch. Results:

Meanwhile, I was thunderstruck – delightedly so – to learn that despite the best efforts of our legislators, there is in fact labelling of genetically modified foods in North American produce sections! Who knew? But if you check the Produce PLU – A User’s Guide 2006, you will find the following right there on page 17:

Q How is organically grown produce coded on a PLU label?
A The number 9 is added to the front of the regular four digit PLU code. (e.g. an organically grown banana would be 94011.)

Q How is genetically engineered produce coded on a PLU label?
A The number 8 is added in front of the regular four digit PLU code. (e.g. a genetically engineered vine ripe tomato would be 84805.)

We owe this to the International Federation for Produce Standards, for establishing PLU (Price Look-Up) codes, which are 4- or 5-digit numbers primarily used on fresh produce items and typically appear on a small sticker applied to the individual piece of fresh produce (info from the Produce Marketing Association). My lingering question is how much GMO produce actually gets labelled in this way, when it’s still something that is only, by law, done voluntarily in this country.